When we arrived back in Gil­git Joe, Jakko, a Finnish trav­el­ler and I decided to cross over to Chitral and onwards to the Kalash Val­ley to visit the spring fest­ival and sample some of the fiery local wine (that last point might have been the main reason, Pakistan being mainly a dry coun­try). Unluck­ily for us, the snow this year had arrived late and the pass across was still closed for vehicles. This meant that we had to cross on foot. None of us was plan­ning on doing the walk twice, so we had to take all our gear with us

We talked to some people and every­body assured us that the walk would be fairly easy and would only take about eight hours. On the first day we took a minibus from Gil­git to Bor­sat. There we stayed in the only ‘hotel’ until 2 am. Only then is the snow hard enough to walk on. Even so, the going was hard until I got used to the awk­ward­ness of walk­ing on snow.

The owner of the ‘hotel’ hadn’t been there that night to tell us where to go, but a local on the minibus gave us some dir­ec­tions, which turned out quite easy to fol­low. Unlucky for us they also turned out to be com­pletely wrong. Soon we were walk­ing across ava­lanche fields while the moun­tain­side got steeper by the minute. Even­tu­ally we found a way to cross the river in the val­ley below and we con­tin­ued along our way on the other much easier side.

After five hours walk­ing we were so exhausted that we decided to set up camp for the day. Until the sun hit our tent I prob­ably spent some of my cold­est hours, put­ting on more and more lay­ers and still it was never enough to stop shiv­er­ing. I fell into an uneasy sleep kind of expect­ing to wake up minus a couple toes. The day turned out to be as hot as the night was cold. We couldn’t move far from our tent as the snow got softer and softer. All the time we were debat­ing between ourselves if we were in the right spot and if we should keep on going or just turn back towards Borsat.

The sun star­ted to dis­ap­pear around 7 in the even­ing. We had decided to turn back, but we still had to wait until 11 for the snow to harden. We figured that because of the higher alti­tude (we were at around 3800m by now) the snow would harden sooner. There is some­thing highly unset­tling about hav­ing to wait in the blis­ter­ing cold, shiv­er­ing and freez­ing uncon­trol­lably, until it gets even colder, just so you can walk back to where you star­ted a day earlier. For 4 hours I stayed in the same pos­i­tion, keep­ing my Indone­sian sarong wrapped tightly around me so no cold breeze could get to me. It was highly uncom­fort­able, made sleep almost impossible and my back ached after only a few minutes, but at least the cold was bear­able that way.

By 11 we star­ted to pack up the tent, cross the river and head back across the snow­fields and ava­lanches. We soon dis­covered that we had mis­judged our pre­vi­ous assess­ment of the cold and the snow. Some­times we broke into snow thigh deep and soon my shoes star­ted to fill with ice. Thank­fully the going was quite tough, so I actu­ally felt quite warm as long as I was mov­ing. As soon as I stopped though the cold was creep­ing into my bones and I could never stop for more than a couple minutes to wash some dried fruits down with some river water.

On the other hand I had developed a huge blister on each foot, thanks to my newly bought boots, and they star­ted to hurt more and more. Jakko hadn’t been able to sleep at all dur­ing the night or the day, so he was soon walk­ing around like a zom­bie. Then one of Joe’s shoes­tring broke and he lost his shoe a few times. Even­tu­ally it was soaked with both water and filled with mud. Thank­fully by then we were almost back in Bor­sat, where we man­aged to catch a few hours of cold sleep until hop­ping on the 6 o’clock bus back to Gilgit.

The guy who gave us dir­ec­tions basic­ally told us not to fol­low the first val­ley on the left, because that leads dir­ectly to Swat, not a good place to be at the moment. What we should have done, though, is first go towards Swat and then turn to the right into another val­ley lead­ing away from Swat. So the path we fol­lowed wasn’t the way to Shan­dur but to another pass. Would we have fol­lowed that route it would have taken us another 2–3 days to get to the next vil­lage. A guide back in Gil­git told us this is only doable dur­ing sum­mer, so I guess we were lucky that we decided to turn back…